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SCISSION represents an autonomist Marxist viewpoint.
The struggle against white skin privilege and white supremacy is key.
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"You cannot carry out fundamental change without a certain amount of madness. In this case, it comes from nonconformity, the courage to turn your back on the old formulas, the courage to invent the future.”
FIGHT WHITE SUPREMACY, SAVE THE EARTH

Thursday, May 17, 2012

It isn't easy being a Zapatista, and it isn't safe being a supporter of the Zapatista either. Many around the world have long forgotten about Chiapas, its fight lost somewhere in the midst of all the drug killings and wars between cartels and military.

Well, folks the incredible story of Chiapas continues and support remains very much in need.

As the post below indicates paramilitaries and death squads operate throughout the region. People die in their beds and disappear in the night. Others who struggle for a free space are just officially locked away in the State's prison.

The Empire understands the nature of the threat the Zapatista represent. That threat goes far beyond guns and bullets.

What to do with a rebellion that is simply not trying to seize state power, but is actually building a new society in the midst of the old.

** They say that they will go today to carry them away to kill them today if they have not abandoned the community

San Cristóbal de Las Casas, Chiapas, May 15, 2012

“On May 16, the paramilitaries threatened to come to kill the compañeras that continue in la comunidad,” denounced Armando Méndez Núñez, native of Cintalapa community, Ocosingo municipality, representative of a group of families displaced from the village since March 2007. The threats were made last Mat 10 by Herlindo López Pérez and Domingo Gutiérrez Hernández, PRI leaders and members of the Organization for the Defense of Indigenous and Campesino Rights (Organización para la Defensa de los Derechos Indígenas y Campesinos, Opddic, for its initials in Spanish).

“They told the compañeras that if they don’t leave their homes, they are going to enter on Wednesday to take them to the mountain to kill them,” adds the Tzeltal campesino, belonging to a group of 13 families displaced by the Opddic from the neighboring Cintalapa and Busiljá ejidos, who are part of the Other Campaign.

In Busiljá, the little girl Gabriela Sánchez Morales was kidnapped in July 2011 and continues to be disappeared. The last time that anything was known of her she was found in conditions of slavery in the home of another Opddic member, an organization pointed to as paramilitary in many communities in the state’s Northern Zone and the northern part of the Lacandón Jungle.

Armando Méndez Núñez, the former “political prisoner, also demanded freedom for Amílcar Méndez Núñez, of Cintalapa, a prisoner since December 2008, and Elías Sánchez Gómez, of Busiljá, detained in December 2011. Both are imprisoned in the State Center for Social Reinsertion of the Sentenced (CERSS) Number 17 in Playas de Catazajá “unjustly,” the denouncer maintains.

Weeks ago, on March 24, Busiljá residents denounced that the para-militaries “passed into each one of our houses, came to the natural spring, after they attacked us by throwing stones on top of our houses and they intimidated us because they were strongly armed and uniformed with bullet-proof vests.”

Afterwards, they went down to the highway “with the intention of murdering a transport driver so that our compañero Elías Sánchez Gómez (padre) would be blamed, but at that moment they encountered a private truck in which soldiers were traveling.” The paramilitaries “began to shoot, to which the soldiers responded, leaving a paramilitary Enoc Gómez Gutiérrez, injured.” After the incident, the soldiers found two long arms and a red motorcycle owned by the paramilitaries from the Busiljá ejido.

The displaced families warn about the danger that their compañeros run that remain in their homes, ask for the detention of those who have been their aggressors, plunderers and expellers without punishment for five years, as well as guarantees to be able to leave exile and return to their communities.

“We demand punishment for the paramilitaries from these ejidos, who are the ones responsible for the kidnapping and for all the crimes that they are denouncing to the public ministers of Palenque, Ocosingo and San Cristóbal de las Casas.”

Wednesday, May 16, 2012

In Europe, they are taking a step beyond sitting in a park, building tents, or marching around in circles. They are planning blockades fin one of the centers global capital to show the widespread disgust with austerity capitalism and the Empire. It ain't a revolution, to be sure, but if you get enough folks involved, blockades can be bothersome to the powers that be. It will be interesting to see how it goes, and then move on to the rest of Europe. I will follow the post below from Precarious Workers Brigade with the call to action from May Action Against TheTroika.

Solidarity with Blockupy Frankfurt

“In the periphery of the EU we are experiencing the extreme effects of politics pushed for by the governments of Germany and France and enacted by institutions representative of global capitalism: the ECB, IMF, EU, and their imposed technocratic governments. Millions of us have been impoverished and driven to misery by austerity and structural adjustment programs, the denial of labor rights and the slashing and privatization of public services, such as education, healthcare and welfare. We are experiencing the looting of human and natural resources by supposedly democratic institutions! (…)

A broad coalition of organizations, initiatives and networks are mobilizing to diverse days of action in Frankfurt from May 16th to 18th . The central element of the protest choreography is mass blockades on May 18, taking place after the take the squares action on May 17 and before the mass demonstration on May 19. The goal of our action on this day is to effectively disrupt the normal business activities of European Central Bank and other central actors in the financial center in Frankfurt. The parties responsible for the global politics of crisis and impoverishment are to be confronted directly in front of the doors of their decision-making headquarters with imaginative blockades and creative forms of civil disobedience.”

#BLOCKUPY FOR GLOBAL CHANGE!

* Transnational call to action in Frankfurt, May 16-19 * International solidarity in our common struggle *

We are calling for massive protests in Frankfurt this May against the crisis regime of the European Union. We are activists representing a multitude of movements and struggles from different European countries and elsewhere, who have risen up in the past months and years to protest the assaults on our freedoms, jobs and livelihoods that have become fiercely intensified in the global crisis. We have joined together and shared our struggles and experiences, and we have realized that in a multitude of local forms, we are fighting the same fight. Like never before, our movements are starting to strengthen each other: a truly transnational opposition is beginning to emerge.

Directly following the global action days on 12M and 15M, where we will protest in our own cities and regions, our transnational struggles will join together in Frankfurt, the European hub of global capitalism and the place of origin of the distress and misery that dictatorship of the markets has caused for millions of people.

We are protesting the widespread impoverishment and denial of democratic rights occurring in the Eurozone as part of a global systemic crisis.

In the periphery of the EU we are experiencing the extreme effects of politics pushed for by the governments of Germany and France and enacted by institutions representative of global capitalism: the ECB, IMF, EU, and their imposed technocratic governments. Millions of us have been impoverished and driven to misery by austerity and structural adjustment programs, the denial of labor rights and the slashing and privatization of public services, such as education, healthcare and welfare. We are experiencing the looting of human and natural resources by supposedly democratic institutions!

These processes are only the most evident sign of the precarization of working and living conditions experienced in all of Europe and beyond. Our social uprisings, traversing the internal borders of the EU, are the expression of indignation acting outside every form of political representation. As representative democracy fails, we leave it behind, creating our own democratic practices in everyday struggles against exploitation.

We are experiencing global migration as another clear sign of the refusal of this transnational system of exploitation, its border regimes and violent wars. It is devastating our earth and basic livelihood. The situation is urgent: we are facing a human-made climate disaster!

Yet in Europe and beyond, we are also experiencing the emergence of political movements that are challenging the everyday exploitation of people and the earth, the social fragmentation, precarization and racism that pretend to divide and then weaken us. By creating connections among these movements and making ourselves visible and powerful, we are attempting to practice a real democracy right now.

In Frankfurt, we have the opportunity to make these connections real, and to empower local struggles on a transnational level. We will blockade a crucial center of global capitalism, learning from what we watched in Oakland and the Occupy movement in the United States, who in turn learned from the revolutions across North Africa, the Middle East and the Indignados of Southern Europe. Let us bring our movements together in solidarity to continue the fight! Let us not miss this opportunity to set the agenda to reinvent our common future!

On May 17 we will occupy parks and main squares in the city center with our tents to create spaces for discussion and exchange. On May 18 we will advance from different points toward the financial district: our vision is a full blockade of the ECB and all the other important financial institutions in Frankfurt to stop their running business. On May 19 we will show our magnitude in a mass demonstration and make it known that we will not allow our societies to be destroyed by financial institutions.

Tuesday, May 15, 2012

The Feminist Task Force and the Global Call to Action against Poverty, in partnership with Greenpeace International and Inter Press Service joined together with regular folks to sponsor and create “Strengthening Voices: Search for Solutions”Women’s Tribunals on Gender and Climate Justice, a series of 15 tribunals and hearings in Africa, Asia and Latin America. The Women's Tribunals involved a collection of authentic, specific and exemplary testimonies of grassroots and rural women who have experienced climate change related problems in their lives and communities, and their search for innovative and successful solutions to them.

It is not so much the sponsoring organizations that matter here. No, what is significant is all the rural women who have offered testimony on what is happening to them, their families, and their communities, and the effort underway by the multitude, if you please, to fight back against an Empire that simply does not care.

On May 10th, the first such tribunal to occur in the USA took place in Charleston, West Virginia. This particular tribunal concentrated on the impact of mountaintop removal coal mining taking place in Appalachia and featured the testimony of women from throughout Central Appalachia. findings from the tribuanl at the Rio + 20 Conference in Brazil this June.

The OVEC Blog writes:

Women in Central Appalachia have been raising their voices for more than a decade calling for an end to this extreme form of mining, yet most state and national decision-makers still turn a deaf ear. We hope that’s about to change. Women at this tribunal aren’t going to hold back. They know that they are unfairly bearing the impacts from mountaintop removal — caring for sick children and other relatives. How many more cancers, heart attacks or birth defects will happen in the hollow before this abominable mining is halted once and for all?

Women are hauling water because their well water is unfit to drink or poisoned, moving away from the homeplace when mountaintop removal makes life in their mountain community too untenable and dangerous, shoveling mud and cleaning up — again – -from a second or third “100 year flood” in the span of a few years, dodging overloaded coal trucks on a daily basis on narrow, winding roads, cleaning coal dust off the house, the car, the porch, and the furniture. And then there are the daily blasts — bombing of the mountains, actually (except it’s legal, because the coal company has a permit…). Shattering nerves and foundations and lowering property values. Then there’s also the incalculable harm to animal and plant communities.

Women have been ostracized and intimidated by mountaintop removal supporters for speaking out publicly, but they haven’t given up. Some have even been arrested in front of the White House. Thank goodness, they refuse to sit down and shut up. And so far, the mountain destroyers just keep tightening their leashes on their agency lapdogs and tossing campaign cash to politicians who do their bidding.

Can you even imagine the heartache of seeing the place where you were born, where your mama and daddy were born, where your kids were born, destroyed — annihilated — entire communities wiped off the map? Streams where you used to dip bare feet in on a hot summer’s day, sit beside for hours, turning over rocks just to watch the crawdads skitter backwards and quickly disappear, now fouled and polluted. And the giant beech tree, the one where the grandparents carved the big heart to declare their undying love — now gone forever — another victim of “grab and go” coal mining. A real-life tragedy is happening here — generations of culture and history erased — a nearly unbearable price these women and their families are paying for the nation’s so called “cheap” energy.

Appalachian women testify against coal industry

An international women's organization put coal — specifically surface mining — to the test in West Virginia Thursday.

The Central Appalachian's Women's Tribunal on Climate Justice largely came to the conclusion the effects of coal mining in Appalachia has disastrous effects on West Virginia. The tribunal was sponsored by the Loretto Community at the United Nations, the Feminist Task Force of the Global Call to Action Against Poverty, the Civil Society Institute and the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition.

Rosa Lizarde, global coordinator for the Feminist Task Force, said the Feminist Task Force spearheaded more than 20 social justice tribunals around the world in the last few years. Most of those were held in the global South, and Thursday's tribunal was the first in the U.S.

"These issues around climate justice — around mining issues — it is really a global issue," Lizarde said. "We took a very local view of what was happening here, and we can relate it to what happens around the world."

Bill Raney, the president of the West Virginia Coal Association, said he was not invited to the event, but disagreed with its premise.

"It simply sounds like the continued onslaught by opponents of the mining industry no matter where it is," Raney said. "They're reaching and trying to use everything they possibly can."

The tribunals are intended to "create a public space for women to draw attention to critical issues at local, national and global levels." The findings of the tribunals will be presented at the Rio+20 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development in Rio de Janeiro in Brazil.

Lizarde said the organization felt it was important to connect global issues to what is happening in the United States to inspire "activism and advocacy at all levels."

"Sometimes the thought is that this type of environmental degradation doesn't happen in the United States," she said following the tribunal.

The tribunal was set up as a mock court trial with witnesses being organized into four categories — health impacts, economic impacts, community impacts and environmental impacts of coal. A three-member panel than acted as judges, evaluating the comments made by the witnesses. The tribunal's three-member panel consisted of:

Lois Gibbs, an activist who organized the Love Canal Homeowners Association when she learned her son's elementary school was built on a toxic waste dump. She later went on to found the Center for Health, Environment and Justice.

Elizabeth Peredo Beltran, a social psychologist, writer and activist, who is the executive director of the Solon Foundation.

Beltran, of Bolivia, said she was touched by what she called "a real crime against … rights."

"We are building systems with a very unfair relationship between those people who sacrifice their lives to give comfort to others, but there is no empathy, no solidarity, just greed as a basis for this system," Beltran said.

Amanda Rauma, project director for West Virginia Free, a women's reproductive rights organization, said the tribunal highlighted a need for her organization to be involved in the debate about mountaintop mining.

"It's really important that we stop mountaintop removal so we can have healthy future generations in Appalachia to make sure that we are able to live life free of the health problems caused by mountaintop removal," Rauma said. "… From the tribunal … I think at this point it's definitely something West Virginia Free and the reproductive health movement needs to get more involved in."

Rauma pointed to studies by Michael Hendryx, a West Virginia University researcher whose studies have warned of health issues associated with living near surface mining sites.

Hendryx has published studies connecting proximity to mountaintop mining with birth defects and higher rates of cancer. The studies were referenced throughout the tribunal. However, others have challenged the veracity and balance of Hendryx's studies.

The studies, said Beverly May, a family nurse practitioner and member of Kentuckians for the Commonwealth, points to an obvious conclusion.

"All the research points to what mountain people have known since mountaintop removal began — it is not possible to destroy our mountains without destroying us," May said. "It's not possible to poison our streams without poisoning our children for untold generations to come. The research is not complete, but there's more than enough research to justify an immediate moratorium on mountaintop removal."

Raney said there is a lot of doubt surrounding Hendryx's studies and said they were "less than thorough."

"You look at Hendryx's studies and their matters of correlation," Raney said. "... You can draw almost the same conclusions he does saying becuase of diabetes in Wirt Coutny, that's why they voted for that (convicted felon Keith) Judd guy on the Democratic ticket."

People who spoke during the tribunal were largely women from the coalfields, many with very personal stories about the effects of coal. While the event's name suggested climate change may be the focus, most of the conversation centered on the more local effects of mining, and not burning coal.

Maria Gunnoe, a nationally recognized opponent of mountaintop mining, talked of her young daughter growing up near a surface mining operation and struggling with breathing problems. She linkes those problems to inhaling dust from a nearby coal operation.

She said her and her family "stayed sick" during blasting operations at the mine.

"This is an assault on my family for coal," Gunnoe said tearfully. " … My daughter grew up, living like this, knowing that she was being sacrificed for energy in this country. That is the real, true facts of what's happening. … If you live anywhere near coal, you are being sacrificed."

Gunnoe said she has continued to watch as her friends and family become ill. The thought of moving away from the operations instead of fighting them provoked a response from Gunnoe similar to sentiments many of the women shared.

"Hell no, I'm going down with the ship," Gunnoe said when people suggested she move.

Lorelei Scarbro, a member of OVEC and community organizer for the Boone-Raleigh Community Group, said she was "thrust" into joining the group.

"We don't live where they mine coal. They mine coal where we live," she said. "… I realize I could no longer sit quietly and peacefully in the head of the hollow."

Raney said the coal industry does various things to mitigate impacts tailored to each community.

"It's individualized to each operation," Raney said. "If there's concerns in the communities, they typically gather and try to make certain those concerns are addressed. They've altered traffic patterns, they've adjusted many diffferent things for the communties, and in my experience it's always worked out well."

An issue the women emphasized was the fear of bringing children into a world they do not believe is safe. Ivy Brashear, a member of Kentuckians for the Commonwealth, said she was worried about having children.

"I'll have to make a lot of important choices in my life," Brashear said. "Of all of the major choices I will have to make, wondering whether it is safe to birth my future children in my homeland of Appalachia should not even have to register on that list."

In addition to health risks, witnesses said, they fear that economic depression could be made worse as it takes fewer men to mine the same amount of coal. Without diversification of the economy, coal could theoretically continue to come out of the ground without returning to previous employment levels because of technological advancements in mining.

"The coal industry, for very strong structural reasons, is a job-shedding industry," said Betsy Taylor, a cultural anthropologist and research scientist at Virginia Tech's Alliance for Social, Political, Ethical and Cultural Thought. "It tends toward monopolization. … We are at a crisis point in Appalachia. … Jobs in coal could collapse."

Raney said that "age-old accusation" was based on a false pretense.

"Clearly, there's a lot of mechanization, automation," Raney said. "It's truly a Star Wars environment to mine coal today in the sense how modern it is and how technology has advanced it so much."

The mechanization and automation, he said doesn't mean jobs are down everywhere. He said science labs and other jobs associated with mining are no longer included in mining jobs because of specialization.

He said those jobs are counted as coal mining jobs anymore.

Taylor said political influence built by the extraction industry has allowed the business to flourish with little benefit to the people around it.

"This is not primarily an economic problem," she said. "This is a political-economic problem. The region has abundant natural and human assets for a stable and robust economy."

Sally Dunne, the United Nations representative for Loretto Community, said she appreciated being able to connect with the women of Appalachia on such a "visceral level" and said the experience was "overwhelmingly emotional."

"I feel so outraged," she said. "… Numerous times today, I just found myself thinking, who are these people who are making these immoral, unethical decisions that are destroying peoples lives?"

Dunne said she believed there was a "real case" to be made for human rights violations in southern West Virginia and referenced presenting that to the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva.

Janet Keating, executive director of OVEC, said if local politicians and companies won't listen, then it may be time to take the information elsewhere.

"The silence on the human health impacts has been deafening," Keating said. "We are going to make sure it gets out. If we need to go to Geneva, we'll go to Geneva. We're not going to stand for this."

Keating said subsidies for coal mining should be going toward re-educating and developing other skills for miners in southern West Virginia.

Raney said the event seemed to be designed to draw attention to mines and miners who have good jobs mining coal.

"They're working and doing a wonderful job here in West Virginia and I don't understand that," Raney said. "I don't understand why they want to take someone's job. Nevertheless, they seem to want to do that."

Gibbs said she was in awe of the practices of the coal industry and of the stories of southern West Virginia women.

"It is so morally wrong. I mean if another country came in and blew the tops off of one of our mountains and harmed and poisoned and tortured and killed our people — we would not tolerate it," Gibbs said. "Why, in this country, do we allow these coal companies, with dollars and cents, come in and do what a terrorist would do?"

Lizarde responded to Gibbs later in a conversation following the event, saying that if another country had blown up U.S. mountains, the country would be at war.

"We should start that war," Lizarde said. "A war against these international companies that are devastating our land and our people."

Gibbs said the state should focus on other means of economic development such as tourism or technology.

"There are industries that will come, and the water can be cleaned up, but you can't get there until you have a commitment to get away from coal and make a transition," she said.

Smith, with the Civil Society Institute, said the organization commissioned a study that found that by 2050, the U.S. could rid itself of coal-fired power generation with no additional technology advances, and without factoring in externality costs.

"There is an alternative to our energy economy without coal, and that won't happen overnight, but we already have the technological know-how," Smith said. "Financially, it would be better, with a much healthier population."

Smith said CSI will continue to support efforts to move away from coal.

"These companies are preventing us from modernizing," Smith said. "If the guilds in the 19th century had the same power that these guys had, we would have never had an industrial revolution. Now they're preventing an energy revolution. It's hurting our economy, and it's killing our people. It's unnecessary, and it has to stop."

Raney stood up for the general criticisms aimed at the coal industry.

"It's a very modern industry, with absolutely the best coal miners in the world that are protecting the environment," he said. "They are mining coal and providing energy to this country and many parts of the world that truly need it. It's low-cost, it's reliable, it's not cuasing people to have electricity rates go up."

Raney said burning coal actually helps people who may otherwise not be able to afford electricity if it came from other types of energy sources.

"Everything these people are advocating are going to raise everybody's electricity rates to the point where many people on Social Security and fixed income are not even going to be able to afford it," Raney said. "They don't explain that."

Jane Branham, vice president of the Southern Appalachian Mountain Stewards, summed up what many called for at the tribunal.

"We know what's causing (ill health effects) and we know what can stop it," she said. "We need to end mountaintop removal today."

The organization hasn’t changed its mind on the team name and iconography of the Atlanta Braves, which (along with those of the Cleveland Indians and Washington Redskins) have vexed American Indians for years. No, what MLB has shut down is a mom-and-pop organization that has been producing shirts with the Braves logo misspelled “Barves.” The made-up word became a Twitter joke when careless (or illiterate) Braves fans habitually mis-typed their team’s name; eventually tagging your tweets #BARVES or #GOBARVES became the ironic way to cheer on the Braves.

Allison and Everett Steele, the married couple behind design and marketing firm Baby Robot Industries, began producing Barves t-shirts and selling them to in-the-know Atlanta fans, but their business venture came to a screeching halt last week when they received a cease-and-desist letter from lawyers for the Braves and MLB. “I don’t have the deep pockets to fight them,” Everett Steele said, according to a report at 11alive.com. “There were more lawyers CC’d on the cease and desist letter email than I’ve met in my entire life. So there’s not much fight they’re going to get out of me.”

The Screaming Warrior logo for the Braves (note correct spelling), which was abandoned in 1988.

That report also contains some of the legal language used in the cease-and-desist letter the Steeles received; the Barves logo and shirts, it said, “dilute and/or tarnish the distinctive quality of the Braves Marks. Accordingly …(it) constitutes trademark infringement, unfair competition, false designation of origin, and/or trademark dilution, in violation of federal, state and/or common law.”

Many Natives might concede that the MLB and the Braves have a point: You have to be careful when playing with logos and symbolism—you don’t want to dilute and/or tarnish anyone’s distinctive qualities.